‘Looking for me?’ a voice said in her ear, and Lizzy started, the champagne sloshing out of her glass as she swung round.
Sure enough, it was the stranger, looking even more sardonic at close quarters. Close to, Lizzy could see that his eyes were grey, but so light they seemed glacial against the darkness of his hair and lashes, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that they could see right through her.
‘Why should I be looking for you?’ she asked, with what she thought was creditable coolness considering that her heart seemed to have taken up residence in her throat, where it was jumping and fluttering and generally making it ridiculously hard for her to breathe.
‘I’m the only person here you haven’t kissed,’ he said. He had an unusual accent, not wholly Australian nor completely American, but somewhere in between. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss anyone out, would you?’
Lizzy swallowed her heart firmly. ‘I only kiss people I know,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know you.’
‘We could introduce ourselves,’ he pointed out. ‘Although I already know exactly who you are.’
Lizzy, opening her mouth to reply to his suggestion, was thrown. ‘You do?’ she asked uncertainly.
‘I’ve been asking around about you. You’re Elizabeth Walker, always known as Lizzy, elder sister of the bride and all round nice girl.’
For some reason this description annoyed Lizzy. ‘That’s not quite how I’d describe myself,’ she said with something of a snap.
‘Oh? How would you describe yourself?’
‘As a professional woman,’ said Lizzy loftily and not very accurately. ‘I’m in PR.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded down at her feet. ‘That explains the shoes.’
In spite of herself, Lizzy warmed to him. He was the only person who had noticed her shoes. Following his gaze downwards, she couldn’t help smiling. There was just something about shoes, Lizzy felt. You couldn’t put on a pair like this and not feel good.
‘Aren’t they wonderful?’ she said, forgetting for a moment that she didn’t like him.
His eyes travelled slowly up from the shoes to her face. Lizzy was tall and built on generous lines. Whenever she grumbled about losing weight, her friends would roll their eyes and assure her that her figure was perfectly proportioned to her height and her personality. Deep down, Lizzy knew that this was true, but it didn’t stop her grumbling. She was normal, after all.
For Ellie’s wedding she had found a fabulous dress that emphasised her warm curves and glowing, opulent skin. Kingfisher-blue, its colour intensified the blueness of her eyes and made a wonderful foil for her wavy blonde hair, bluntly cut to her chin, and her stylishly bold lipstick.
There was no way that Lizzy could be described as a classical beauty, but her face was so vivid that no one ever noticed that her nose was too big and her mouth too wide or that there were already lines starring the edges of her eyes.
‘Wonderful,’ Tye agreed. His face was quite straight, but something in his voice set a blush stealing into Lizzy’s cheeks, and she looked quickly away. It was a relief when his gaze dropped back to her shoes. ‘But not very practical,’ he added.
They certainly weren’t. She had nearly twisted her ankle several times on the uneven woolshed floor. To her chagrin, Lizzy realised that she had been holding her breath and let it out. ‘There are more important things in life than practicality,’ she said firmly, and a disconcerting gleam of amusement lit the cool grey eyes.
‘You must be the only person in this woolshed to think so!’
That was probably true too, Lizzy reflected, glancing around at the people she had grown up with. They were all wonderful, and she loved them deeply, but they didn’t understand about shoes.
‘You have to be practical if you live in the outback,’ she said, her gaze coming back to meet his almost defiantly. ‘I don’t. I’m a city girl now.’
‘So I gathered.’
Lizzy didn’t quite know what to make of that. There had been an odd undercurrent to his voice that she couldn’t interpret. ‘You seem to know all about me,’ she pointed out with a challenging look, ‘but I still don’t know who you are.’
‘I’m Tye Gibson,’ he told her, and he smiled sardonically at the expression on her face. ‘Yes, that Tye Gibson,’ he answered her unspoken question. ‘Didn’t anyone tell you that the black sheep of the district was back?’
‘No,’ admitted Lizzy, too surprised to think what she was saying.
She couldn’t help staring. Tye Gibson! No one had seen him since he had walked off his family property nearly twenty years ago, but of course they all knew about him. Breaking off all contact with his father, Tye had turned his back on the bush and gone on make his fortune. Not just an ordinary little fortune, not just millions, but serious money.
Lizzy had never been absolutely sure what Tye Gibson did—something to do with communications, she thought—but she knew that his company, GCS, was a global giant, and that his name was a byword for ruthlessness around the world. It wasn’t bad going for a boy from Barra Creek, but nobody wanted to claim him as a local hero. However Tye had made his fortune, it hadn’t been by being nice.
It seemed that anyone who ever had to do business with him regretted it, and the press didn’t like him any better. Refusing to be interviewed or photographed, Tye Gibson was apparently content for people to think of him as heartless and amoral, and the richer and more reclusive he became, the more the myths about him proliferated.
Nor did the district he had grown up in have anything good to say for him. Lizzy had been a little girl when he’d left his father to struggle on his own, and anyway had never met him, but gossip travelled fast around the outback and she knew all about his unsavoury reputation. Nobody had been sorry to see him go.
But now it seemed that he was back—and it wasn’t hard to guess why.
‘Aren’t you a little late?’ she said.
Tye’s dark brows lifted. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father’s funeral was a week ago,’ said Lizzy pointedly.
‘So?’
‘So couldn’t you have made the effort to get here in time for that?’
His face hardened. ‘I think that would have been a little hypocritical, don’t you? My father and I hadn’t spoken for twenty years. What would have been the point of me weeping crocodile tears over the coffin? Besides,’ he went on, glancing around him, ‘I doubt if I would have been very welcome. That’s been made very obvious today.’
‘Are you surprised?’
‘Not in the slightest.’ There was a cynical twist to Tye’s lips. ‘Nothing’s changed round here. I never expected to be greeted as the prodigal son.’
‘Perhaps if you’d come back to see your father when he was alive, you would have been,’ said Lizzy tartly.
She must have drunk more champagne than she’d thought. She wasn’t usually like this. Normally she had the sunniest of natures and wanted everyone to like her, but there was something about Tye Gibson that got under her skin and left her feeling ruffled and somehow aggravated.
‘He wanted to see you,’ she told Tye, who lifted a disbelieving eyebrow.
‘Did he?’
Lizzy lost some of her assurance. ‘Well…that’s what I heard. I heard that he’d begged you to come home so that he could see you before he died.’